COTS 2 percent in Ada

COTS 2 percent in Ada

[Karl A. Nyberg]

In article <SRCTRAN.93Jul20092944@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com (Gregory
 Aharonian) writes:

>Well most COTS stuff is not done in Ada
>(less than two percent of all COTS stuff has Ada inside), so Perry's
>policy, if successful, will do as much to undermine Ada as the current
>hypocrisy that is tolerated.

Two percent.  Is that by weight or volume (contents may have settled during
shipping :-)) or by amount of CPU cycles consumed on a yearly basis or
dollar volume in the "software market" or what?  What's the margin of error
on the survey (whose source, by the way, you have conveniently failed to
mention)?  What are the percentages for other languages of interest?

That vendors of commercial software would announce the underlying language
used in their implementations is surprising enough to me.  That Ada would
have as much as two percent of the market is even more astounding.

Still, a little backup material on this claim is warranted.

-- Karl --
-- 
Karl Nyberg			-- karl@grebyn.com
Grebyn Corporation		-- 1-703-281-2194
P. O. Box 497			-- Yes, I speak for the company.
Vienna, VA 22183-0497		-- I own it.

Re: COTS 2 percent in Ada

[Gregory Aharonian]

>>Well most COTS stuff is not done in Ada
>>(less than two percent of all COTS stuff has Ada inside), so Perry's
>>policy, if successful, will do as much to undermine Ada as the current
>>hypocrisy that is tolerated.

>Two percent.  Is that by weight or volume (contents may have settled during
>shipping :-)) or by amount of CPU cycles consumed on a yearly basis or
>dollar volume in the "software market" or what?  What's the margin of error
>on the survey (whose source, by the way, you have conveniently failed to
>mention)?  What are the percentages for other languages of interest?

    At the recent debate at the WadaS symposium, I presented a lot of data
on programming language use, mostly with regards to C/C++ and Ada.  As I
have said many times before here, my data and analysis vis-a-vis the 2%
figure are neither comprehensive nor methodical.  They are however, in the
Ada world, the only data available, and hopefully my year long campaign
to interest someone in the DoD to fund a study to find out the truth and
do a comprehensive survey and census of programming language use will
eventually succeed  :-)

     However, I can give you an rough idea of how I calculate the 2%
figure, which is probably very generous, for reasons I will explain below.
At the debate, I presented data on indicators of programming language use.
These indicators included new jobs in help wanted ads, numbers of companies
and products for each language, surveys of embedded use and R&D use, use
by top fifty independent software vendors, thesis use, and number of
product bindings available in each language.
	I also was subjectively biased by knowledge of the contents of my
database of information on all of the reusable computer programs in the
country (15,000+ and growing) coming out of defense, government, university
and private facilities.  I mention this not so much because it influences
the analysis, but more so to plug my software reuse consluting services :-)

     The results were, discounting any government (DoD/NASA) use of Ada,
that use of C/C++ is forty times more prevalent than use of Ada outside
the Mandated world, which when you include data for other newer languages
like Smalltalk, translates into about a 2% COTS share for Ada.  Given
that the non-Cobol/non-Fortran world is only about 40% of all programming,
you can probably conclude that Ada's COTS share is about 1%.  (Also, without
detailed investigation, it is hard to subtract out sales of non-Ada products
by Ada companies, which has some affect on these figures).

     Admittedly, not the most accurate or comprehensive analysis, but it
is the only analysis.   This is very sad and very dangerous for Ada, since
my data was collected over many years, and the trend shows little changes
over the next few years.  The DoD, including the Ada9X office, the STARS
project, and Perry's COTS initiative, are developing strategies and policies
in the blind that based on past results, will only serve to weaken Ada's
market share outside the Mandated world.

    What's the truth?  Who knows?  And frankly, who cares?  I have yet to
encounter anyone inside the DoD who gets alarmed by either these figures,
or the lack of more reliable figures.  The DoD does not fight wars without
military intelligence on the enemy and its terrain - why is it doing so in
its Ada battle?
-- 
**************************************************************************
 Greg Aharonian
 Source Translation & Optimization
 P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178